I'm reading Neal Asher's Prador Moon. An alien invasion of an interstellar human society. The aliens are giant sentient crabs with a taste for human flesh, and extremely hard to kill. Asher is very good with xenobiology run amok, and this one's no exception. Lean and mean, just over 200 pages - not ...

I'm stunned. :o Shawshank Redemption is almost universally praised as the best King work to ever be made into a movie, and personally, I think The Green Mile is even better. I felt it got robbed, losing out for Best Picture to American Beauty. The Mist concerns a small group of Maine residents, trap...

Gotcha.

I was having a senior moment. Which is pretty bad for a 53 year old.

Frank Darabont directed The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption. This is guaranteed to kick ass!!!!!

Wayfriend, you've totally lost me with that comment. And I've seen the LotR films a dozen times.

If you mean two people talking about the same subject back and forth, isn't that what can happen on any thread of any forum? Assuming that nobody else chooses to chime in?

I check King's official website every couple of weeks. (By the way, King has dusted off an old manuscript called Blaze, originally intended as a Bachman novel, and he has revised it. He expects to have it finished by the end of the year, so hopefully it will see publication in 2007. Also he's workin...

Okay, anything new is good.

I picked up the free promotional DT sketchbook last night. There's not a lot there, plot-wise, but the artwork is sensational. This Jae Lee, I think, is going to do it justice. :D Some of the artwork makes me think, though, that the story is going to be a rehash of the flashback events in Wizard and...

Balon, Wizard and Glass as the high point of the series is up for debate. Personally I consider it number two, with the finale, Dark Tower VII, as the best. And V and VI, although not quite on the level of Wizard and Glass, are still tremendous reads and way above the norm in epic fantasy. So keep o...

I like the name of King's musical group - The Rock Bottom Remainders.

I just read Stephen King's newest short story in Playboy, called Willa. Yeah, I know, I gotta be the only guy who picked that magazine up for the fiction in it. :P The story is mediocre, IMHO, one plot twist, but it's in the first third of the story. The rest is a mood piece, and I'm more into an ex...

I'm finishing Dan Simmon's Olympos. Superb novel, better even than Ilium. Wonderful imagination and truly epic in scope and execution. I really enjoyed how the old-style humans (Dan's word, not mine) changed and matured and really hung tough against overwhelming odds. If you love sf, and have any in...

Martin, here in the States disguised as a big old lovable teddy bear of a guy, is in reality Osama's right-hand man. His Song of Ice and Fire is a cleverly concocted codebook for a terrorist takeover, and Martin's so-called hobby of toy knight collecting was their way of laundering money and transpo...

It's another example of how King isn't all that original . . . he just takes ideas and does them better than anyone else has before him.

I'm reading Stephen King's Lisey's Story, and yes, it has enough fantasy elements in it to qualify for this thread. You may have heard it's King's version of a romance, but trust me, no typical romance reader has read a love story quite like this one!!

Stephen King considered The Dark Tower a lifelong project, but fortunately for his readers, he got down and finished the thing, after nearly perishing in an auto accident. Hopefully Martin will not "push the envelope" regarding his own mortality, and he will manage to knuckle down and comp...

I started with Night Shift and The Stand, but I was already an adult. Well, age-wise, anyway.

I agree with Martin's opinion completely. Cersei doesn't change, we're just seeing her character from her own limited and biased point of view.

Once again, masterful writing on Martin's part. His characterization is the best in the genre, IMHO.

I envy you your first read of A Game of Thrones.

Back in 1996, I was very disillusioned with epic fantasy. Then I read The Lions of Al-Rassan and A Game of Thrones. Kay and Martin restored my faith in the genre.

Yes, the stories in Gunslinger were originally serialized in that magazine. They sort of have a cobbled together feel to them in the book, too, which I think hurts it, compared to the rest of the Dark Tower series. However, King revised The Gunslinger just before the publication of Wolves of the Cal...